A new survey finds 60 percent of businesses cut problematic Gen Z staffers in the last year, as many said they’ll hesitate or avoid rehiring younger workers who had trouble navigating professional environments. | Photo: Getty Images.
BY BRUCE CRUMLEY | INC.
It’s become something of a trend among business owners and managers in recent years to lament the inadequacies–and the attitudes–of their Gen Z workers. Now, many bosses are starting match those critiques with remedial action by both firing those youthful employees and thinking twice about bringing other members of that generational cohort aboard.
Those are the findings of a recent poll by education and career advisory platform Intelligence, which quizzed nearly 1,000 business owners and executives about their views of Gen Z workers. Responses to questions largely echoed recurring complaints that employees born between 1995 and 2010 are entitled, standoffish, demanding, and insufficiently skilled to meet their employers’ requirements. But this time, bosses also said they’d begun addressing those shortcomings, with 60 percent saying they’d fired at least one recent Gen Z college grad this year.
Perhaps more concerning for young people who transitioned from classrooms to 9-to-5 jobs within the last two years was employers’ growing level of discontent.
Fully 75 percent of respondents complained “some or all of the recent college graduates they hired this year were unsatisfactory.” As a result, over 16 percent of bosses and HR managers said they’d hesitate before signing on a Gen Z candidate again, with 14 percent saying they’ll avoid doing so over the next year.
While that kind of thinking clearly doesn’t apply at every company in the nation, the study reflects many business owners’ concerns, according to the data. While nearly 95 of businesses surveyed said they’d hired a recent Gen Z college grad, around two-thirds of respondents described those recruits as undershooting expectations.
What were employers’ main gripes about Gen Zers at work?
Nearly 50 percent of respondents said Gen Z hires lacked motivation or initiative. Other cited deficiencies included professionalism, organization and communication skills, reactions to criticism, and work experience. And a whopping 90 percent of business leaders said those younger workers “should undergo etiquette training.” Get those pinkies stiff at teatime, and lose the cargo shorts.
Does that mean employers are finally dropping the “my way or the highway” hammer on what they see as willful and entitled members of the Gen Z labor force? If so, that backlash will probably be limited in both scope and duration.
For starters, business and Gen Z are bound by a mutual dependency that will only strengthen with time. Today, already 37 percent of the youthful cohort is working for at least one employer. Forecasts indicate that by 2032, one of every three jobs will be held by a member of Gen Z, and that number — and the group’s importance to the labor pool–will onlly grow with time.
The disappointments and resentments expressed in the survey are just one lane of a two-way street of misunderstanding. As TeachingStartup founder Joe Procopio wrote in Inc. while addressing a warning to those same bosses in June, “Gen Z is pissed. At you. Not ‘them.’ You.”
The reason? Members of the generation had barely left the womb before they were confronted with some truly awful situations created by the older people now lecturing them as bosses. Those included the 2008 financial meltdown and Great Recession, which in turn generated the layoffs and hardships many workers struggled through while trying to raise their Gen Z kids.
Then came the pandemic, just as these new young arrivals to the labor market landed their first jobs.
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